Noy Holland - The Spectacle of the Body

It would please me to think you might think of me as a girl you picked up driving once, or thought to pick up driving once, who says, as we ride, nearly nothing. That we have met perhaps in a dream you might think. That we have eaten pork chops — this would please me. That we have left the last bright diamond field, the shrinking glare of hamburger joints, of car lots and Circle K’s, dog tracks and Sears.

You are so pretty.

Is there nothing I can say to you?

Is there not a vein you love lashed beneath your mother’s skin as she lets you fiddle with your fingers?

Must you follow with your fingers the broken and the boldened roads, the turnpikes, the highways, the lists made of names of towns to go to sitting beside your mother’s bed for the last breath breathed out at the back of the house?

You may go now.

But will you come back?

Will you not come to hear her calling you late from the wide fields, from your hay forts and your strewn caves — the thin rain, the cities?

The cities flee from my windows.

I do not rest much. A run of music, a plain door, in the hard streets the sound of horses sends me on.

I push on.

Sometimes a door opens.

Sometimes with some man spent in me, Mother comes to me tugging her catheter, the limp, blooded tip of it, out from where I have forced the tube into Mother’s — I want to say — womb.

Is it possible to be gentle?

Her skin is a yellow bruise.

Mother dents where you touch her.

I am like her. Each day I am more like her. I have her hands, my mother’s mouth, her long, straight body.

Go fuck yourself, Ohio.

We tied our mother by our wrists with scarves and to the bedstalks by our ankles. We had a great stash of morphine, a run of hot nights of a sweetened cast that clotted in our throats. We had gizzards. We grew scales. We had feet. We were bottom-feeders.

We were flat out over our lake by night with each a stone to ride by. Our stones grew smooth. They sunned all day. We found it warm to hold them. We eased the stones over the rim of our skiff and the water rose on the flank of our skiff and rose again for my brother. Our skiff nosed up and flattened. Our skiff nosed down and flattened. We had chosen each one stone. We held them. It was all we could do to hold them. We tipped, tucked over, dropped ourselves into the water. All the moon long, we fell. The stones rode against our bodies. Past breathing, unsharpened things we fell past. It was pleasing. Our lives grew strangely pleasing. We were told the lake had no bottom. It was said the lake had no bottom. Our lives grew strangely pleasing. Such creatures — whiskered, feeding things, shelled things — we bumped past. We came upon the lake’s dark bottom.

Did you think we would die of it, Mother?

Everywhere was a bruise on her, and the flecked wounds of our needles. Her bones scraped under her skin — we could hear them, when she moved at all, when we helped her turn in bed. We turned her to salve the widening sores that mouthed out from the weight of her bones, from the weeks, the months she lay there.

We brought pretties. We brought her things to smell. We brought our mother things she used to think to speak of. There were smoothed things — leviathan, terrapin, Pawnee. We moved along the silted bottom. Our hearts thrilled in our ears.

She waked up screaming.

Orbit waked up screaming.

The sky stayed the same pale haze.

Her cookware and cameos, a deck of cards, her cigarette box, needles, nylons we buried out in the garden. We dragged our beds to the garden. Sometimes we sang.

We brought slingshots. We had Bingo and kitchen knives, a certain native know-how. The days grew dusty. The fields were tipped with ocher. We bound our mother with her bright scarves by her wrists to her bed, by her ankles. Our beds we dragged to the garden. Our turtles scuffed in the garden. We had shards of pot and bone, rabbit and whistle pig; dogs dug under our broken fence to nose over us in our garden. Mother called out. Bingo chewed up her slippers. Bingo chewed up a rhinestone shoe Mother used to dance the Charleston in — years back, or days back, should you ask her. Ask her would she show us, and Mother would be our scissor knees, our wild arms on the screen porch, a thumbnail, some harvest, and old green or fish-belly moon it would be our want to ask her.

We planted the rhinestones two by two with a foot between in the garden. We grew. We were still growing. We carved our names into our arms. No rain came, no father. Orbit stayed out in the garden. I would leave Orbit out in the garden. A house is so dark inside when you have been out in the garden. I wore bracelets of leaves. Her gold lame, I wore it.

“Mother,” I said, “it’s me.”

“If you say so,” she said.

I said, “We were out in the garden.”

“I see. And what did you sow?” she said. “I’ve seen no moon to plant by.”

“No moon, Mother. No motherlight. By twos we planted bright stones to lead us out from the garden.”

“Stones, child?”

“Stones, Mother.”

“And what of your mother, child?”

“We will dig her a hole in the garden.”

“And how will you face her, child?”

“As I do, Mother. With a difference.”

“Then face her south, then. But will you bind her?”

“No, Mother.”

“But will you face her? Will you build for her a simple box that the dirt not burst her eyes?”

“If you wish, Mother.”

“Are you certain, child? What wonders the dead accomplish. But the living? Oh, uncalmable, a palsied, mewling sack. To breathe, I am cinched and watered. This is a child’s love, child? Child, you call this love, child? Love?”

We could see her form the garden. We tied rabbits by loops of string to cornstalks in the garden. We kept Gander. We filled a trough for frogs.

I held her. It was all I could do to hold her. “You are trying to kill your mother,” she said. “Are you trying to kill your mother?”

Underfoot is a millet of bone. The road opens out in a graveyard. Will you drive on? Have you not seen me? Do you see that they cut us bone to bone to sort through what might grow in her as we had grown in Mother? The wound gapes, leaks bile. Mother cannot swallow. Mother’s veins collapse. For moths the doctors come and go back out into Tuscaloosa. For moths I will not lie with her and then one day I lay with her and in the nights thereafter and after a time to lie there, curved into the wound in her, I think to grow in under her, bone by bone, my toothy spine her long wound’s tongue and groove to seal her. I think, if ever he comes to her, my father will come to feel me there if ever my father should touch her, and to feel me I think would please my father as I pleased my father once, my chipped spine my mother’s skin will come to overgrow in her.

I can make her please him.

I rouge her cheeks, tease her hair, her slack sex sponge clean.

He will feel me. Our father cannot but feel me — a bone-hard nub in the soft, in the bowly hot suck and leech and long swim of Mother.

Get me out of here. Unmother me.

Oh, the airports of Ohio. There are salt bluffs in Ohio, roads to take run slick by rain to drive into my Ohio — these wasted acres walked off, strewn caves, my caverns scraped, stripped mines, ravines.

I cannot get free of her. She is tongued, gashed, towered. A door will open. She finds me eating. She finds me lacking. I am in some mall or lobby, some truck stop or Sears, six-stone set in some riverbed, she finds me. She finds me on the road some night like as not in your rig some night where we have maybe swung wide in the gone seas of Ohio.

Listen, you. You, Einstein. Hum up, boy.

But there is more. There is always more. There is yet light enough, and always some motel out here with walls as thin as ice, enough breath: night: talk enough to kick a stone to town.